“I flew to Rome three days before the visit. It was not the first time I had been there. I know it fairly well, and do not like the city despite its charm. This time, too, as I walked around it my soul said no and no again to the city. I am a rural person and the grandeur of Rome repels me. It always has. It is some kind of madness that everybody wants to live in cities, and Rome is the city par excellence. It is redolent of the cruelty and grandeur of empire. Even the last historical Rome, the Rome of Mussolini, expresses the same thing—the power of force over the weak individual. In the Vatican you feel that even more strongly.
“I spent the whole day before the audience walking through the Rome of the catacombs. That is quite a different matter, a small, secret, hidden world trying not to be noticed by the urban power and create some kind of independent existence. Nobody ever manages that, although it is a very touching desire. Great faith, simplicity, and boldness are to be found in that reluctance to acknowledge grandeur and power. I came out of the catacombs completely calm and stopped worrying about my meeting the next day.
“I suddenly realized I was going to profess my faith and was prepared to say everything I think, concealing and keeping quiet about nothing. After that, come what may. Of course, I knew my judge was not like Pontius Pilate because he would never ask the rhetorical question, ‘What is Truth?’ He already knows for a fact exactly what it is.
“I had seen the Prefect before, the first time at a meeting with priests from Eastern Europe, and another couple of times, but not so close. He is tall. I’m sure you know, Hilda, that of all tall people you are the only one who does not disconcert me. Very tall and very short people belong to different species. Enough. Altogether, I feel more at home with people who are not tall, present company excepted, of course.
“He immediately told me he had read about me, knew about my past in the war and considered that priests like me who had experienced the war were particularly valuable to the Church. At that I thought that probably no sense would come out of our conversation. I did not bother to talk about the real meaning of all experiences of war. I thought he did not know how war brutalizes, distorts, and destroys a person, but he is a very subtle conversationalist, and immediately detected my reaction, changing the subject:
“‘You conduct services in Hebrew?”
“I explained the peculiarities of the Christians in my community to him, for whom Hebrew is often the only common language. Among my parishioners there is a couple, she is Dutch and he Spanish, who talk Hebrew between themselves. There are not a few such people.
“I used to conduct the service in Polish, but now a new generation has grown up and hardly any of the children of Polish Catholics speak it. Hebrew is their mother tongue. In addition, there are baptized Jews who have immigrated from other countries.
“He asked about translations and I told him that a number of translations already exist. Some we have done ourselves, but the Psalms, for example, we take from Jewish sources.
“I was well aware that he had a denunciation which no doubt informed him that I do not recite the Creed. What else was written there, I could only guess.
“The Prefect suddenly took a step in my direction and said that Christianity is multicultural, that the kernel, the heart should be common to all, but the shell can be different for different peoples. A Latin American is quite unlike a Pole or an Irishman.
“I was terribly pleased. I had never imagined I would find an ally in him. I told him about my meeting with a certain African bishop who told me bitterly that he had studied in Greece, served in Rome, assimilated the European form of Christianity, but could not require his African parishioners to become Europeans.
“‘Our traditions are more ancient, and the African Church is extremely old, and my people dance and sing in church like King David, and when I am told this is impious, I can only reply, We are not Greeks or Irishmen!’ That is what he told me, and I replied that I, too, could not see why Africans should have their service in Greek or Latin in order to understand what a rabbi from Nazareth had said!
“‘Nevertheless, our Savior was not only a rabbi from Nazareth!’ the Prefect commented.
“‘Yes, not only that. For me, as for the Apostle Paul, he is the second Adam, our Lord, the Redeemer, the Savior! Everything you believe I also believe, but in all the Gospels he is called “Rabbi.” That is what he is called by his disciples, and by the people. Do not take that “Rabbi” away from me because that, too, is Christ! I want to ask him about things that matter to me in Hebrew, in his own language!’
“You see, Hilda, I thought, yes he is right. Priests who have been through the war are a bit different. For example, I am not afraid to say what I think. If he prevents me from conducting services, I will celebrate alone in a cave. Here, in Rome, there existed a great Jewish church in the caves.
“I said, ‘I cannot recite the Creed because it is full of Greek concepts. These are Greek words, Greek poetry, metaphors which are alien to me. I do not understand what the Greeks say about the Trinity! An equilateral triangle, one Greek explained to me, has all its sides equal, and if “filioque” is not used correctly the triangle will not be equilateral. Call me what you like, a Nestorian, a heretic, but until the fourth century nobody spoke of the Trinity. There is not a single word about it in the Gospels! It was thought up by the Greeks because they are interested in philosophical structures and not the One God, and that is because they were polytheists! I suppose we should be grateful they did not set up three gods, but only three persons! What persons? What is a “person”?’
“He frowned and said, ‘St. Augustine wrote for us …’
“I interrupted. ‘I very much like midrashes, parables, and there is one parable about Augustine which I like far more than all his fifteen volumes about the Holy Trinity. According to legend, when Augustine was walking by the seashore, contemplating the mystery of the Holy Trinity, he saw a boy who had dug a hole in the sand and was filling it with water which he was scooping with a shell from the sea. St. Augustine asked him why he was doing that. The boy replied, “I want to bail all the sea into this hole!” Augustine smiled and said that was impossible, to which the boy replied, “Well, why are you trying to bail all the inexhaustible mystery of the Lord with your intellect?” The boy immediately disappeared, but that did not stop Augustine from writing all those fifteen volumes.’
“You know Hilda, I do try to keep my mouth shut, but that got me going! How can they go on sounding off about this? With all this clever chatter they cast doubt on the ineffability of the Creator. They already know there are three persons. The structure of electricity is something nobody knows, but the structure of God is something that they know! The Jews also have speculators of this kind, the Kabbalah goes in for it, but that is of no interest to me. The Lord says, ‘Take up your cross and follow me!’ and man replies, ‘Yes!’ That I understand.
“‘Prefect, you have just said that the nucleus, the kernel must be common to all, and this kernel of our faith is Christ himself. He is the necessary and sufficient factor. I see in him the Son of God, our Savior and our Master, but I do not want to see in him one side of a theological triangle. If anybody wants a triangle, let them worship a triangle. We do not know that much about him, but nobody doubts that he was a Jewish teacher. Allow us to keep him as a teacher!’